This blog is written by Lee Gale Gruen to help baby boomers and seniors find more joy, excitement, and satisfaction in their lives after retirement from a job, career, parenting, etc. Her memoir, available on Amazon.com, is: Adventures with Dad: A Father and Daughter’s Journey Through a Senior Acting Class (website: AdventuresWithDadTheBook.com)

A few months ago, a woman bought my memoir. I ran into her recently, and she told me she had really enjoyed it. “I knew you had something to say when I first met you,” she commented.

There’s a trendy term for that: “finding your voice.”It means getting in touch with and revealing your innermost feelings—expressing your real self.It’s a hard thing to do.After all, we keep so many things private fearing that if others learned them they’d misuse the information, and we’d be harmed in some manner: rejected, ostracized, manipulated, criticized, lose control, etc.

Have you found your voice?When is it finally your turn to do so?In my case, I was too inhibited by social constraints:this isn’t acceptable; I might hurt someone’s feelings; someone might get angry at me; I might be judged; someone might find fault with me.So, I went for years without saying what I had to say.I was so good at keeping my true feelings hidden that I even did it from myself.

I finally decided to write a memoir.It was just supposed to be a lightweight, father/daughter bonding book about when my father and I attended a senior acting class together when I was sixty and he was eighty-five. However, as I wrote, things appeared on the page almost involuntarily. Sometimes, I would sit back and ponder what I had just written:I didn’t realize I felt that way. I haven’t thought about that incident in decades. I was finding my voice through the process of writing about a small piece of my life.My sweet, little memoir became much more than that; it became a catharsis.The hidden feelings I was writing about are universal feelings, I’m sure, filtered through my own unique experiences.

How do you feel about things, about life, about your own life in particular?When is it time for you to start saying it? You don’t have to write a book like I did.There are many ways to say what you have to say. If you like writing, then keep a journal or diary, write a letter to a friend (remember letters?), write a letter to the editor, write an article for a publication.If your preference is verbal, then tell it to a friend, acquaintance, group, therapist, the world.

We all have something to say.It’s gratifying to finally say what you feel inside without having to mask it for society’s approval.Try it.It may take baby steps, but with some practice, it will become easier.

Please pass my blog along to anyone else who might be interested and post it on your Facebook, Twitter and other social media. If you want to be automatically notified when I post a new blog, click on the “Follow” button in the upper right corner of this page and fill in the information. To read my other blog posts, scroll down on this page or click on “Recent Posts” or “Archives” under the Follow button.

Some really true stuff in there LGG. I’ve found that reaching my curmudgeon stage has freed me up from worrying so much about what others think of me. It’s so liberating to be beyond that high school fitting-in frenzy that causes so much youthful angst.